New at Rosetta Stones: The First Survivors

What started with a bang continues with a roar: our next installment of The Cataclysm explains a bit about how a forest can be destroyed completely yet quietly, and delves into the experiences of some of the survivors. It would have been longer, only it snowed a bit tonight, and I went out to play in it, so I decided for the sake of sleep time to split our story into people in cars as opposed to people on the ground. That turned out to be quite long enough!

Lest you think everything inside cars was fine, look at the heat they got subjected to:

Melted tail light of truck on north side of Spud Mountain at equipment site, northwest of Mount St. Helens. Cowlitz County, Washington. June 5, 1980. Image and caption courtesy USGS.
Melted tail light of truck on north side of Spud Mountain at equipment site, northwest of Mount St. Helens. Cowlitz County, Washington. June 5, 1980. Image and caption courtesy USGS.

Things got a bit… heated. And sandblasted. And banged up with bloody great stones. Yeow.

While you’re enjoying some volcanism in action, don’t forget to check out Karen’s post on obsidian. Sniny!

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New at Rosetta Stones: The First Survivors
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4 thoughts on “New at Rosetta Stones: The First Survivors

  1. rq
    1

    Eeeyaaaay!! Off to read!
    And, apropos of nothing, I caught the name of this book on Pharyngula yesterday, and was wondering, did you know? Apparently it’s new. And you’ve been posting Ingersoll. ;)

  2. 3

    I have been reading The Broken Land by Frank De Courtin a geologic history of the Great Basin, and it describes the mid tertiary explosive volcanoes that occurred where todays Great Basin is. They were far far larger than Mt. Saint Helens! In fact at places its more than just a caldera but a caldera complex much like the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. Large areas of the Great Basin are covered by tuff that is the result of these eruptions and in some places the tuff has turned into vitophyre which a fancy name for a rock that is basically obsidian with larger crystals, in Nevada it was produced when the hot ash had more ash deposited on it so that it got squeezed together. Of course this also relates to the prior post as the fancy word is sometimes used to describe obsidian.

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